Since I enjoyed Colson Whitehead’s book Harlem Shuffle, I decided to pick up arguably his most famous novel, The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Blurb:
Cora is an enslaved field worker at the Randall Plantation in Georgia, a place of hellish brutality and cruelty. She and a fellow slave named Caesar decide to make their escape using the underground railroad, which consists of an inconsistent and ever-changing network of train tracks and locomotives. The book follows Cora as she uses the railroad to travel to different states, each with its own laws and philosophies regarding race and slavery, all the while fleeing from the slavecatchers who hunt her down with a rabid intensity.
Review:
When I picked up The Underground Railroad, I hoped for an engaging story with characters I could root for and an interesting, original exploration into slavery, race, and America. Unfortunately, I got neither of these things.
Before diving into my problems with the book, I want to praise Whitehead’s writing. Each sentence is carefully crafted for maximum effect, and while sometimes I cringed a bit at certain lines that read as too heavy-handed, others struck me as poignant and profound.
Since Whitehead spends so much of the relatively short book having the main character encounter different places and scenarios as well as switching the perspective to other characters, Cora felt underdeveloped. Cora and the other characters serve more as a vehicle through which Whitehead can explore his ideas rather than real people, so at a certain point I stopped caring about the narrative as a whole. The villains of the story were bizarre and unbelievable, which is not ideal in a story about slavery—the best stories about slavery show enough of the white oppressors’ humanity for readers to understand what forces corrupted them, while refusing to forgive or excuse their immoral actions. I might not have minded the underdeveloped characters if he had tackled his themes and ideas in an original and deep manner, but that was not the case.
The Underground Railroad provides an alternate version of United States history. Almost all of the events, ideas, philosophies, and circumstances it contains do show up throughout US history, but he warps events, geographies, and timelines so that Cora faces what feels like nearly every major race-based attack on black people and learns about every major racist philosophy in the span of a few years. It read as if Whitehead wanted to write a book about slavery, but he wanted to be original about it. So, he used an interesting but half-baked premise to cram hundreds of years of black oppression into one book, neglecting meaningful characterization in the process. Instead of exploring the nuances of race relations and the American identity, his mishmash of horrors felt surface-level because he tried to tackle so many things at once. I think that this book may have been better as a series of short stories, where he could take the premise of each section and flesh it out in a Twilight Zone-esque narrative without having to worry about connecting everything or writing complex, sympathetic characters.
Ultimately, the payoff of this book did not come close to justifying the book’s strange contrivances. The idea of a literal underground railroad—built in a world with nineteenth-century technology—is absolutely ludicrous. However, I was willing to overlook it if it allowed Whitehead to say something important or interesting. Unfortunately, the opposite is true and I worry that some readers will have the wrong takeaways from The Underground Railroad. Readers with a very rudimentary knowledge of American history might take a lot of the book at face value, thus gaining a warped and incorrect understanding of US history. Other readers who know enough to understand that Whitehead is condensing the narrative and switching things around, but who cannot tell exactly where he is doing so, might assume that part of the fictionalization is him exaggerating the horrors of slavery, especially since slavery’s cruelty is easy to dismiss as fictional unless one knows better. The best-case scenario is that someone without extensive knowledge of American history reads his book as a fictional introduction to some of the basic themes of slavery and race in America and use it as a launching point to explore the factual versions of these events.
In theory, someone who knows enough about American history to pinpoint exactly when, where, and how Whitehead manipulates events should stand to gain more from this book, but unfortunately the only lesson I “learned” was that racism has corrupted every aspect of America’s past, present, and future—an idea that anyone who has studied African American history will have already encountered in more complexity, emotion, and detail in other texts. Left without anything to grab hold of, I ended the book annoyed at the underdeveloped nature of the premise, characters, and plot.
The Run-Down:
You will probably like The Underground Railroad if:
· You are looking for an introduction to the main themes and ideas of African American studies through a fictionalized, alternative history narrative.
· You don’t mind a book sacrificing character development or believability for the sake of a unique premise.
You might not like The Underground Railroad if:
· You want to read a character-centered story with complex, highly-developed protagonists and villains.
· You are looking for a historically accurate work of historical fiction.
· You dislike dark, violent stories .
A Similar (but much better) Book:
Kindred by Octavia Butler. Similarities between these books include:
· Stories with black enslaved protagonists in antebellum America
· Use of fantasy (Kindred) or alternative history elements (The Underground Railroad) to explore themes of race and slavery in America
· Exploration of how slavery affects America’s past, present, and future
Graphic: Death, Death of parent, Child abuse, Child death, Forced institutionalization, Genocide, Kidnapping, Racial slurs, Violence, Rape, Grief, Confinement, Hate crime, Sexual assault, Slavery, Injury/Injury detail, Racism, Torture, Medical trauma, Murder, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Pedophilia, Abandonment, Sexual violence, and Trafficking
Moderate: Blood, Classism, Panic attacks/disorders, Colonisation, Fire/Fire injury, Ableism, Pregnancy, Mental illness, Miscarriage, Suicidal thoughts, Gun violence, and Misogyny
Minor: Bullying, Chronic illness, Suicide, and Alcohol